Why do we talk about freedom when we are not free? We say that we must be free, that freedom is the ground of being, etc., but are we not just believers in freedom? Could it be that we are not free because we don’t really want to be? If the conditioned brain really wanted freedom, wouldn’t it just drop the pretense that it knows what its doing?
When the truth is that I don’t know what I’m doing or why I’m doing it, can I awaken to this truth, or is awakening the end of I? Can the brain conditioned to believe and behave according to its beliefs, see that it is rooted in a container, a limited constricted, confining substitute for the unlimited ground of being?
Believers are liars, and we know this is true because what is actual does not have to be believed - it is self-evident or demonstrable, whereas a belief can only be defended or rejected. Believers love or hate their beliefs by obeying them or violating them, without ever understanding why they can’t see the duplicity that enables believing.
Whether we believe we are believers or not, a counter-belief is just modified believing. The conditioned brain is a potted plant that can’t help but believe in freedom for as long as it is contained within its boundaries.
Are you saying that if I can form an image of anything, that that image ‘replaces’ the actual thing, in my mind? If I have an image of freedom or love or god etc they become beliefs? Then what is it that can’t ‘become’ an image, it is only this actual ‘now’? Not my image of now but the actual happening right now? It is only this moment that is “self evident”.
Being free is living in the unknown. (Or so it seems to me, but what do I know?) The unknown is thrilling and equally terrifying. Or I should say: the thought of the unknown. The unknown itself is, well, unknown! Being free might be like being in free fall, it’s hard to imagine anything more frightening than that. “Fear is the mind killer.”
Wasn’t Inquiry getting at, that that is not the ‘unknown’ but an image that you ‘believe’ in and react to etc. The ‘unknown’ is not an image but simply ‘what is’? Now. The unknown is now.
I felt that all humans operate with their own belief system. Every one is different from others. Some believes are core that he himself doesn’t know that he believes them. Some are so strong he would never compromise, few he is willing to compromise, change, modify. So, one is always working on his belief system, continuously changing into a new version as long as he is satisfied…
Every one has a belief system and not having a system is also a system.
FREEDOM for me is that not stick to any system of belief.
Yes and the terror comes from the image. Except for instinctual (hard-wired) fear that comes from the body being threatened by imminent harm, like a fist or loud noise or runaway train.
Does knowing that it’s part of your belief system change anything about the belief? Can beliefs ‘hide’ when the light of understanding is illuminating them? Who wins: belief or truth?
And so with god, spiritual enlightenment, happiness etc…all dead images that occupy the brain and not understanding that they are that, keep it in pursuit of them. Similar to the donkey, hopeful that he will at some point reach and eat the carrot?
Flashlight is right! It’s like being able to see, reasonably clearly, only your Matryoshka doll or 1-2 dolls above and below it, rather than the whole nested heap. Maybe one of the reasons we don’t see the whole is that we (egoic we) know that we’d come apart at the seams (seems!) if we did.
Words…words…words…and their meaning and the confusion it creates…
I am sorry, may be I didn’t make it very clear…
Let me try in a different way
What I mean was, if you asked me to pick any two digit number and I picked a double zero or I didn’t pick any. Picking up any number is a system and not picking us also a system.
If you’re saying that choosing is systematic, then everything the conditioned brain does is systematic, and can’t be otherwise because we are conditioned to behave systematically.
If this is true, the conditioned brain is not serious about freedom unless it is increasingly aware of how systematic, predictable, and limited it is.
